4K Review: 'Hell Fest' Gains Clarity With High Dynamic Range

Though it turned an okay profit, grossing $11 million domestic on a $5.5 million budget, Hell Fest, which is out this week on 4K and Blu-ray, might not have done well enough to merit the sequel it clearly craves...unless the home video release picks up some steam. But it presents a rare case of a low-budget film that uses the 4K format to its advantage. Most of the time, 4K is used to upgrade classics, or showcase really expensive effects, but for Hell Fest, it's simpler: the movie was shot mostly at night, with enough fog and lens flares to give John Carpenter and J.J. Abrams migraines, and lots of bright red lighting. If new movies were still being released on VHS, it would be an absolute visual nightmare with color bleed more profuse than any of the actual bleeding onscreen. But this is what high dynamic range is for: the bold color and lighting choices that would wreck lower-res formats are kept nicely separate and clear here. It's a clarity that only misfires once, in a wide shot that appears to expose many of the extra patrons in the park as CGI.

Hell Fest's premise is so good I'm surprised I haven't seen it done more: a masked killer attends a theme-park's Halloween Haunt, and uses it as his personal slayground. The Houses October Built and its sequel flirted with that a bit, using the "found footage" style and filming of actual attractions to create a storyline, but this one is constructed from the ground up, with production designer Michael Perry having actually designed haunts and dark rides for real. With exteriors shot at an actual park (alas, we are not told which one) and interiors created on soundstages for maximum camera-friendliness, Hell Fest offers all the fun of a theme park Halloween for people too scared to actually go to one. (I confess, I won't go to one alone, as being frightened constantly by real people is only fun when you have friends to laugh about it with -- but will watch any movie solo, in part because the wife often refuses when it's horror.)

Director Gregory Plotkin, an editor whose first film as director was Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (fear not; this is way better than that), amps up the park action by having the characters gradually move to more VIP areas of the park, where waivers must be signed and actors playing monsters are allowed not just to touch you, but also fake-vomit on you and carry you off. That's bad news for our initially fearless group of college kids who soon come to realize that not every kill they're seeing is fake. As in Final Destination 3, Tony Todd provides voice-over for many of the attractions, though he also briefly shows up in person to host a stage show and give the movie some horror-veteran cred.

The killer, known as The Other and portrayed by stuntman Stephen Conroy, never really gets much of a motive -- his melty-Michael-Myers mask under a hoodie is just a so-so look, and his reasons for choosing the victims he does is unclear. Sometimes he goes for an elaborate prank like fake-texting; others he's pulling a bathroom assault just like Myers in the last Halloween movie. And the ending suggests he's not just some pure-evil boogeyman, but a conveniently homicidal hobbyist. If so, we need a bit more. There maybe aren't as many pure scares here as some fans wanted, but I've always been more into creative settings and kills, myself...perhaps that's why I liked The Nun more than most. Among the primary cast, Scream: The Series' Bex Taylor-Klaus is always a welcome presence to elevate pulpy material, while potential final girl Reign Edwards is a bombshell with backbone.

I'd love to see this become a franchise, branching into different types of fictional horror theme parks, but that future seems hazy at best, so I'll root for rip-offs instead. The relatively bare-bones disc includes a documentary featurette that answers a lot of questions, but it never actually says which park they filmed this at. I'd love to know. And despite the macabre outcome of the movie, I'm sure it would be good for business.

I have been a writer, editor, and occasional newsman since 1999, appearing in such publications as the LA Weekly, OC Weekly, New Times, L.A. Times, Deadline, Nerdist, and E! Online, among others. I live for pop culture. I even married an actress, whom I met when I killed he...